Hospital directories with physician profiles are typically provided on a hospital website to enable actual or prospective patients to search for a particular healthcare practitioner affiliated with the hospital by name and/or specialty. The hospital directory generally provides certain background information on the practitioner enabling new patients to consider the specific education, areas of expertise, awards and publications, age, languages spoken, and even a personal statement explaining the physician's particular approach to the practice of medicine. After reviewing such physician profile information in the hospital directory and making a selection, the prospective patient is generally invited to contact the physician's office by telephone or visit the physician's practice group website.
The problem with hospital directories is that they generally do not provide much of the information that the patient would like to know before selecting a physician, such as accepted insurance plan(s), and booking availability. Physicians are often affiliated with multiple hospitals and as a result, providing all of this variable information in any one hospital directory becomes a difficult if not impossible undertaking for both the physician and the multiple hospitals. Each hospital has its own procedures and rules regarding, for example, displaying insurance acceptance, physician credentials, office hours and patient communications, and these procedures/rules may or may not be compatible with those of the other hospitals with which the physicians are affiliated and/or which may or may not conform with the various practice management procedures and rules followed by the physicians in their own offices. The net effect is that hospital directories provide only limited information, and the process of collecting, reviewing and approving that limited information requires significant human resources. As a result, hospital directories are typically in a state of disrepair and provide a very low rate of return on attracting new patients, hospital resource utilization, and ultimately revenue and profit.
Insurance company directories may also contain profiles of their participating physicians and suffer similar problems. Still further, the failure to provide accurate and complete physician profile information can impose even greater costs on the insurance companies. For restricted plans (e.g. an HMO) that require patients (subscribers) to use a doctor within an approved provider list, the insurer is often mandated by state law to provide the subscriber with an appointment within a specified amount of time. Facilitating this process is therefore of paramount importance to the insurer. Still further, a very high percentage of a health insurer's costs are emergency room visits; reducing such visits by its plan members, by enabling a regular office visit instead, represents a huge potential cost savings.
The issues described above have been long-standing problems for both hospitals and insurance companies, and for their patients and physicians.